Boyd Rice Returns

Whenever someone asks me to describe what experimental music is, I usually end up talking about the early pioneers in industrial music: Throbbing Gristle, Z'ev, Monte Cazzaza and Boyd Rice, aka NON.

Rice began recording back in 1975. This year, Boyd Rice returned with a new record on the Mute record label, called "Back to Mono". While many industrialists have hung up their boots, Rice continues on.

What is experimental music. NON is experimental music. Experimental music is about non-conventional approaches to music, often from very strange or entirely oblique angles. For example, using non-musical things as musical instruments, like a high tension wire sampled into a synthesizer to create backbeats, or using feedback as a part of a song. What happens to music when you take away the basics of what makes it music, such as melody, beat or rhythm? Or replacing pleasant sounds with harsh ones?

NON did all of these. He works almost exclusively with noise, and used tape-loops extensively (that's a reel to reel tape machine rigged to play repeated passages). He was one of the first to experiment with using the turntable itself as an instrument, playing with off-centre drilled holes in his second single to allow the record play at different oscillations, making the music different depending on which hole the record was played from. He also used lock-grooves. Normally, records spin from the outside in, playing an entire side of a record as it spirals into the centre. Lockgrooves lock the needle into one rotation, creating a repetitive noise that can only be stopped or changed by moving the needle to another part of the record.

The live experience of music was also an important part of the industrial movement. Throbbing Gristle was legendary for playing sounds thought to incite their crowds into uncomfortable mental states, and goading their audience from the stage into violence. NON used a shoe polisher as an instrument on stage, and an instrument called a "rotoguitar", a guitar with an electric fan attached to it. They often used multi-media in their stage shows, projecting movies or still scenes on the back of the stage.

NON's music is not easy to listen to, but that's the point. Does music need to be pretty or easily accessible to? What about making it difficult to listen to, or even uncomfortable or impossible to listen to? Is it still music? This is what experimental music is.

http://youtu.be/U4TmBf_cVLo